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How To Lose Weight When Riding A Bike

 

Hey guys, Dustin here, CEO of sixthreezero. Today we're going to talk about how to lose weight when riding your bike. So before we get started, don't forget, comment below, ask us any questions, tell us your thoughts, or reach out to us at the team at sixthreezero we want to hear your feedback and we're also here to answer your questions. So let's jump right in. How do you lose weight on a bicycle? I know a lot of people get bikes because they want to get out and get exercise and potentially get back into shape and lose weight. Well, I think that's great.

Bicycling is a very low impact form of exercise. Most people learn to ride a bike at some point in childhood, if not adulthood. That's great too. Once you get the hang of it, it's simple. You can burn calories, get exercise, get a great leg workout. So a couple of secrets, tips, and tricks to riding a bike to lose weight. If you're going to get a single speed bike and cruise around at four miles an hour, regardless of how long you ride, I'll be honest, it's not going to be an extremely good form of exercise. However, it will burn calories. And I'm not saying that's not good. If that's what works for you, then please do that because it's better to ride than to not ride at all. 

But the secret or my tip to riding for exercise to lose weight is, you really want to get your heart rate going. You really want to get your body sweating. So what do you do to do that? Well, number one, find a ride that's got some hills on it. The key to really elevating your heart rate is going up and down hills. If you've ever done a spin class before, part of what they do is, they put resistance on the bike and they try to recreate like you're doing hills. That whole feeling of standing and sitting and peddling hard really gets your body working, it gets your heart rate up, and it gets you sweating.

And most of you had heard now a big buzzword in the weight loss field is high-intensity interval training. And really that's the ideal way to create weight loss on your bike is to try to do interval training to get the heart going and the body pumping. So try to find a ride with hills. Even if it's just one Hill to start, and it's too much for you after one hill and you get your heart going, that's good. Just keep building slowly time by time and maybe over time, you can integrate several hills. And then over time, you might be doing only hills. You could go up the hill, down the Hill, up the hill.

Now, obviously, the fun of riding a bike is to take scenic journeys. So going up and down the same hill wouldn't be fun. But you can map a ride out to find elevation changes. A couple of places I go to map rides are mapmyride.com. There are some other ones out there if you just Google. Mapping routes. They'll actually tell you what the elevation change of the ride will be. So yeah, I'll put some other places to look in the description for rides. But the cool thing is, is they will tell you the elevation changes. So you can see what kind of workout will this ride be and it will tell you the distance so you can kind of get an idea of how hard will you have to work.

The next thing I would say too is to make sure you try to make your ride at least 30 minutes. Now, I'm not an expert in weight loss, I'm not certified personal trainer, but there's a lot of information out there about how much cardio should you do a week to lose weight. And I've heard about 30 minutes a day, five times a week. It is the minimum you want to do to lose weight. So when you're going out riding your bike, ideally you're getting on there for at least 30 minutes. Now, if you could only do 20 minutes one day, 40 minutes the other cause of your schedule, obviously that's better than nothing. But if we're really trying to focus on weight loss, try to get every ride to a minimum of 30 minutes.

So in addition to that, other than doing the hills, the other real key to weight loss on a bike is to vary the gear that you're using, and to vary what tempo or as they say in spinning class cadence, how fast are you peddling? So one good thing to do is, let's say you have a seven-speed bike, maybe for a mile, you flip it into the seventh gear, which is going to be the hardest to pedal, but it will take you the fastest, and you try to get your cadence going, or you move your legs as fast as possible in seven gears for one mile. Then you downshift to say third gear and it's a little easier. Maybe you slow your pedal, let your legs recover a little bit.

So any variation in that throughout your ride as opposed to leaving it in one speed and just going, oh sorry, one gear and one pedal cadence the entire trip, vary that up a little bit to get your body working easier and harder, which that's going to recreate the interval training that is known to create weight loss as well. So maybe go half a mile and pedal as fast as you can in first gear, then shifted up and go to the seventh gear, then go on a hill and put it in seventh and see how fast you can do it. If you can really create that variance throughout the whole ride, I guarantee you're going to get a good sweat going and your heart's going to get a great workout.

So those are my three tips for weight loss on a bike. Number one, try to make it a minimum of 30 minutes. Number two, try to find some hills on that ride. And number three, very up the cadence and the resistance, just like in a spin class. And the benefit of being outside is, it's going to be a lot more scenic and a lot more fun. So if you have any comments, questions, please comment below and ask me. And again, I'm not a certified trainer, I am not any certified person in weight loss, but these are just tips and advice that I think will work from what I've heard.

And lastly, you can reach out to us as a team at sixthreezero.com with any questions. And don't forget on our website, go to the top, we have a body fit questionnaire. Take the quiz, put in your personal information and see what bike we recommend for you. It's going to be suggested based on your body. And two other things, we have a 365-day test ride policy. If you buy a bike, you don't love it, send it back within 365 days, no questions asked. No money, no fees out of your pocket. We cover everything. Lastly, we have a lifetime warranty. For the lifetime of your bike, we will warranty it, take care of anything if you have any problems. That's it. And enjoy the ride.

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